Cuba plunged into crisis: diet of bread with sugar and beans with weevils

We interviewed the journalist Camila Acosta Rodríguez in París América about the serious economic crisis facing Cuba, considered by some as the worst in several decades. She gave us her testimony from Havana, where she highlighted cases of elderly people fainting due to lack of food, operations that are performed without anesthesia, fuel and food shortages.

Shocking videos of elderly people fainting in the streets due to lack of food are circulating on social networks. However, this is not an isolated case, as the Cuban journalist Camila Acosta tells us from Havana. “I have also been informed that prisoners in jails faint from lack of food. They are given very little food,” she notes.

During a recent protest in Guantánamo, protesters complained of starvation and revealed that they have been eating bread with sugar and beans with weevils for several days.

In addition to all this, it multiply the long lines to obtain foods and access public transportation. “Even the ambulances are out of fuel,” says Acosta.

The sick cannot leave their homes or die in medical centers due to the lack of means of transportation to take them to hospitals, which in many cases also lack medicines. “I heard about a person who had to undergo an operation in the hospital using only Lidocaine, which is an ointment to numb parts of the body, but it is not anesthesia,” says the correspondent for the ABC newspaper in Havana.

The situation is alarming and no sector escapes economic collapse. Furthermore, according to Acosta, “there is no hope of improvement”. One month after taking measures within the framework of the ordering policy, President Díaz-Canel admitted in a public speech that they were going to “order the ordering.” Therefore, according to this journalist, the Cuban officials “are very disorganized” and “it seems they don’t know what they are doing.”

There are Cuban economists who advocate favoring small and medium-sized companies as a way out of the economic crisis. Camila Acosta shares this opinion: “The only way to save the Cuban economy is by releasing the productive force and allowing access to the free market.”

The response to the protests, particularly the historic demonstrations on July 11, 2021, has been an increase in repression. Since that date, the number of political prisoners in Cuba has exceeded a thousand. “These are the highest numbers of political prisoners registered since the beginning of the so-called Cuban Revolution,” the journalist points out. For her, the only way to make the Cuban regime yield is through international pressure and giving visibility to the deep discontent of the Cuban people.